Little brother

The old man turned his withering gaze upon the young man, his eyes narrowing as he took in the impossible perfection of the being before him.

"Now who are you, brat?" The grizzled old man demanded, leather-skinned fingers clenching tighter. "Some puny whelp playing at powers beyond his ken?"

The young man met the old man's baleful glare with a dispassionate stare, his full lips quirking ever so slightly.

Slowly, almost lazily, he extended one bare foot and nudged the gory remains of the assassin he'd so casually erased. With just the barest effort, the mangled cadaver went hurtling across the clearing to smash into two of the black-clad killers.

The force of the abrupt impact sent them tumbling like rag dolls, shredded meat, and jagged shards of bone, spraying in an obscene arc. Their anguished shrieks of shock and agony shattered the tense silence, only to be drowned out by the enraged bellow of their robed commander.

"Enough of this wanton savagery!" he spat, his upraised hand trembling with barely contained fury. "Kill this whelp before he despoils our rightful quarry any further!"

At his signal, the remaining seven assassins surged forward with bestial roars, their curved blades slashing in pitch-black arcs. They closed ranks around the youth in a whirling dervish of flashing steel and whip-crack impacts of bone on flesh.

Yet the young man seemed to anticipate their every feinting strike with almost precognitive ease. He flowed around their slashing daggers like smoke through a lath gate, leaving streaks of crimson droplets in his wake with every razor-thin score of his flawless skin.

But wherever those carmine beads fell, virulent lines of necrotic decay erupted across the ground, rotting the very soil as if each droplet of spilled ichor spawned a miasma of pure entropic force.

With an almost contemptuous flick of one hand, the young man's leg lashed out, slamming into the temple of the closest assassin. The impact shattered the killer's skull in a gruesome spray of bone and brain matter, his limp frame ragdolling away before it even hit the ground.

Moving with the same fluid, boneless grace, the youth pivoted amid the ring of remaining blades, hands blurring into fists and claws of shearing force. Flesh parted like silk beneath those maelstroms of strikes, even as his impossible reflexes allowed him to evade the shrieking impacts of the assassins' counters.

Within scant heartbeats, the brutalised remnants of his enemies littered the ground, steadily expanding pools of ruin. Shredded sinew and pulped organs glistened beneath shards of compound fractures and eruptions of bone shrapnel.

Through it all, the eldritch warrior moved with an almost hypnotic, practiced economy, each motion flowing into the next in an unbroken, organic continuum of frenzied, lithe violence. Like some sanguine dance choreographed by the orchestrators of oblivion itself.

At last, he straightened from the obscene ruin around him, his luminous hair shining and pristine despite the cyclone of carnage that had engulfed him only moments before. Only a few flecks of blood marred his flawless porcelain features, lending him an almost ethereal, demonic aspect in the firelight.

The final assassin fell to his knees, both arms hanging at shattered, unnatural angles from his torso. He met the young man's burning gaze with bulging eyes and a low, gurgling groan in all that remained of his voice. Even as the dying man slumped forward into the puddled ruin of his own organs, the implacable warrior raised one foot and brought it down on the back of his foe's skull with a wet, melon-splitting crunch.

Silence reigned in the clearing for one eternal moment. Even the sounds of the primal nightmare unfolding beyond the treeline seemed to abate in the wake of the young man's single-handed butchery.

It was into that void that the old man bellowed his outrage, his withered face twisted in rage, and no small amount of primal fear.

"FUCKING BASTARD! You'll pay dearly for defying me this night, reeking of your misbegotten, demon-sired bloodline! When I am done, your filthy remains won't even-"

With an almost theatric flourish, the robed sorcerer unfurled his free hand, ropy tendrils of eldritch force lashing out like bullwhips. Each venomous lash curled through the air towards the unmoving warrior, sizzling with virulent power.

But the young man did not so much as flinch. In fact, his only reaction was a slow, predatory grin that morphed his heavenly features into something demonic and feral. When next he spoke, his melodic baritone dripped with the same malignant scorn that bled from his crimson-burning gaze.

His neck snapped as he tilted his head, and his eyes turned deadly serious.

"You shouldn't have called me that!" His voice dripped with menace, and everyone in the vicinity suddenly felt the chill and the pressure bearing down on them.

"Well now, you fucking geezer… It seems you've finally earned my undivided attention. Let's see if your feeble sorceries can back up that withered tongue of yours before I shred it from your mewling gullet."

With those mocking words, the youth shifted into a fighting crouch, every sinewy rope of sculpted muscle and tendon rippling beneath his luminescent skin as he centred his focus like a silverback marksman sighting down the shaft of an arrow.

The first lash of eldritch force streaked in, only to detonate against an invisible sphere of coruscating crimson energy that flared into existence around the young man in the blink of an eye.

A retaliatory shockwave erupted outward, slamming into the sorcerer with enough kinetic force to rupture internal organs.

The sorcerer staggered, wheezing through a ruptured lung as a gout of arterial blood sprayed from his lips. But before he could retaliate further, his foe had crossed the intervening distance in a blur of unholy speed.

One moment, the young man stood untouched in his warding sphere. The next, his right hand had clamped around the sorcerer's throat like a cruciating vice of corded steel tendons sheathed in pearl. Those long fingers convulsed, and the old man's eyes bulged grotesquely as his trachea collapsed with a gurgling crunch.

"How dare you..." The young man's words emerged in a bestial growl, each utterance rumbling from somewhere deeper and more primal than any mortal vocal cords. "How dare you spit such filth upon me, fetid worm!"

Before the reeling sorcerer could even begin summoning his dark powers, his assailant's free hand lashed out, pulverising the old man's wrist in a single, savage, wrenching motion. Shards of bone erupted through leathery skin as the gnarled staff thumped to the forest loam, its owner's scream of agony drowning in a nauseating gurgle of blood.

Too late, the doomed sorcerer's remaining hand clawed at the iron grip, crushing his windpipe.

But the young man's ruby-eyed death glare allowed no reprieve. With another vicious flick of his wrist, he hoisted the old sorcerer from his feet, his flailing legs kicking weakly at empty air.

"You have the boundless temerity to besmirch my lineage?" Each earth-shaking word dripped with feral menace: "You aren't fit to lick the dirt from my boots, let alone challenge me, carrion feeder!"

As if to punctuate that claim, the young man arched backwards, channelling his preternatural strength in a single, brutal overhand throw. The old sorcerer's ruined frame went hurtling across the camp in a missile trajectory, only to detonate against the base of an ancient oak with a sickening concussive force.

The impact pulped bone and organ alike, coating the mighty tree's bark in a wide fan of bloody viscera that slowly oozed to saturate the loamy soil beneath it. Yet the young man was not sated in his wrath.

In three long strides, he closed the distance to the pulped ruin that had once been his foe. Those bottomless, crimson eyes narrowed to pinpoints of smouldering malice as he stooped, extending one hand over the steaming offal. A faint ember of eldritch force flickered into existence, writhing and twisting around his splayed fingers like miniature black hole singularities.

Then, like a collapsing star, those entropic vortices lurched inward, seeming to devour the matter and energy of the sorcerer's defiled remains at an ever-increasing rate. Within moments, everything from bone shards to splattered blood had been broken down into its component atoms, devoured by the insatiable pull of that unholy singularity.

The young man rose once more to his full, imposing height, nostrils flaring as he regarded the perfectly pristine patch of earth where his enemy had met its end mere moments before. Only then did the bone shaking growl bleed from his throat in a tone of cold finality.

Lord Aldren and the last survivors were frozen in abject terror.

Even the stalwart Ser Martyn trembled uncontrollably, his sword slipping from numb fingers to clatter uselessly at his feet.

Just moments ago, the knight had been prepared to foolishly challenge this unholy being. Now, the depth of his insignificance in the face of such apocalyptic power was laid bare.

The caravan folk could only cower in the shadow of their ill-fated lords, their minds barely cohesive enough to register the sounds of their own mewling whimpers.

Lady Elysia alone seemed untouched by the primal dread paralysing those around her.

With trembling steps, the noblewoman moved away from her husband's protective embrace, slippered feet tracing a path through the charnel remnants and decaying detritus.

"Jagnar?" Her tremulous voice cut through the still silence.

Yet that single utterance made the young man turn to her. For a single, silent moment, Lady Elysia met that crimson blaze of unholy power and did not look away.

"You... you are Jagnar, are you not?" She called out again, her conviction steadying her tone despite the blistering energies scouring her porcelain features.

The young man looked at her with a stoic expression and then sighed.

"Yes..." The sibilant admission seemed almost toneless, but Lady Elysia perceptibly wilted as if a great burden had been lifted. "Yes, elder sister... I am Jagnar."

Before he could continue, the woman closed what little distance remained between them. Her slender fingers reached up to cup his chiselled features, shining tears of relief and profound sorrow tracing glistening tracks down her cheeks.

"You've returned, sweet brother," she murmured, uncaring of the blazing energies searing her very existence in his presence. "Returned to me after all this time, but so terribly changed.What happened to you?"

For his part, the person who had so callously expunged life on an unrelenting scale only moments earlier seemed utterly perplexed beneath her trembling caress. The smouldering malice in his gaze dimmed ever so slightly, revealing only the slightest hints of vulnerability and confusion.

"I..." His full lips parted, but only a weighted exhalation emerged. "I was on my way to the estate."